Modern Source Engine Games, How Noel Makes Video Games in 2025.

Even in 2025, people are still making new games on the Source Engine and some of them are surprisingly good. In this video, I go over four modern Source games that caught my eye, from Vietnam-era shooters to surreal robot afterlives. Whether you’re here for the nostalgia or the innovation, these are worth checking out.

I’m a source engine enjoyer, its really cool to see some somewhat modern source engine games still being produced.

The most interesting in this collection to me is Klaus Veen’s Treason, a standalone murder-type gamemode, which is actually mountable to be opened up and accessed as a mod via Garry’s Mod.

When I share stuff I’m working on, people frequently ask how I make games and are often surprised (and sometimes concerned?) when I tell them I don’t use commercial game engines. There’s an assumption around making games without a big tool like Unity or Unreal that you’re out there hand writing your own assembly instruction by instruction.

Noel has truly shipped, its hype to see quite a technical blog post from him.

For the current game project, he’s using his own framework built around SDL3 called Foster.

Another really neat thing Noel has changed about his setup:

Finally, to wrap all this up … I no longer use Windows to develop my games (aside from testing). I feel like this is in line with my general philosophy around using open source, cross-platform tools and libraries. I have found Windows increasingly frustrating to work with, their business practices gross, and their OS generally lacking. I grew up using Windows, but I switched to Linux full time around 3 years ago. And frankly, for programming video games, I have not missed it at all. It just doesn’t offer me anything I can’t do faster and more elegantly than on Linux.

Year of the Linux desktop?